The Wall Street Journal ran both articles under the byline of Kevin T. Dugan, cloaking its innuendo in the prestige of America’s most storied financial paper.
But behind that veneer of journalistic gravitas lurked a far darker story: Dugan has, according to documents obtained by Freedom, long been an active member of a secret anti-Scientology hate group called “The Outer Banks”—a group whose declared aims center on “destroying Scientology,” and which publishes incendiary posts such as “make them suffer” and “Scientology should be shut down.”
“The guy trying to run this start-up exchange belongs to the religion. So what?”
The Journal’s report didn’t exist in a vacuum. It endeavored to influence investors and regulators and damage reputations—all on the strength of an article that bore the authority of the nation’s premier financial daily while concealing the reporter’s allegiance to a clandestine hate group dedicated to attacking the subject of his coverage. What presented itself as conventional business journalism was therefore merely weaponized reporting—cloaked in duplicity and carrying real-world fallout.
Perhaps that’s why bewildered readers questioned WSJ’s motives in the article’s comments:
- “What was the point of this piece?”
- “I’m not religious, but this is just an innuendo write-up attacking someone for being a member of a church.”
- “This is a bizarre article. Not sure what the point is. Should we start calling out all the religious ties for Catholics, Jews and Mormons? Oh, that’s right, a short while ago the WSJ took a shot at the Mormons. Very odd.”
- “So the point of this long, long piece is to say what?”
- “Is there an editor in the house?”
- “The guy trying to run this start-up exchange belongs to the religion. So what?”
- “After hundreds of words, this article’s greatest achievement is not exposing a fault, but rather manufacturing a perception in the public. The text is an insidious mixture of insinuations, inappropriate for the investigative journalism expected from the WSJ.”
The Dugan-WSJ affair unfolds as trust in US journalism hits record lows. On October 2, Gallup reported that just 28 percent of Americans now express a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report fully, accurately and fairly—the lowest figure ever recorded in Gallup’s decades-long trend.
The Dugan episode, therefore, stands for something larger than one reporter’s lapse—a glaring demonstration of how ethical breaches and hidden biases amplify the public’s cascading distrust of media institutions, and drive the legitimacy crisis facing the Fourth Estate.
Once upon a time, a solid majority of Americans trusted the news media. In the 1970s, Gallup regularly recorded trust levels between 68 and 72 percent. But over the decades, that confidence eroded:
- By 1997, it had fallen to about 53 percent.
- By 2004, trust dipped below majority levels—and never recovered.
- By 2024, trust had hit 31 percent, tying a previous low.
- This year, it sank further to a pitiful 28 percent.
The slide is bipartisan and intergenerational:
- Republicans now register a mere 8 percent with any trust (great deal or fair amount) in media reporting.
- Independents’ trust sits at 27 percent, essentially unchanged, and at all-time lows.
- Democrats show only a slim majority of 51 percent expressing trust—the narrowest margin in recent years.
- Among those 65 and older, 43 percent trust the media, while no younger group exceeds 28 percent.
The collapse of legitimacy now places the media at the very bottom of Gallup’s institutional confidence rankings. For comparison, Gallup found that 67 percent of Americans expressed trust in their local government and 55 percent in their state government—more than double the confidence now shown in newspapers, television and radio. In fact, Gallup has consistently reported that local and state governments rank far above the press, underscoring just how far journalism’s standing has collapsed in the eyes of the public.
Against this backdrop, the Dugan case resonates loudly.
If the Gallup poll is any guide, the media’s credibility is now floating on thin ice—and the Dugan-WSJ affair offers a textbook reason why.
The Wall Street Journal, like all major news organizations, is subject to editorial oversight, fact checks and multiple stages of review. And yet the WSJ failed to disclose Dugan’s blatant conflict of interest to readers. That failure becomes especially consequential in a climate of suspicion—and illustrates several core challenges in media ethics today:
- Hidden conflicts of interest: Journalists are expected to recuse themselves or disclose personal agendas when covering subjects in which they are personally invested. Failure to do so invites the same accusations of bias that now dog Dugan.
- Anonymous sourcing and transparency: In the absence of transparency about motivations or backgrounds, readers have no way to vet credibility. In the WSJ piece, many of Dugan’s claims rested on unnamed sources with an apparent axe to grind.
- Protected status and media bias: As a protected class, minority religions already face misinformation and bias in coverage. When a hostile reporter like Dugan targets them, the imbalance is magnified.
- Institutional responsibility: Even if Dugan insisted he had no partiality (an impossibility), the WSJ had a duty to vet disclosures and guard against ideological infiltration of its news content.
- Accountability and recourse: If a mainstream newspaper knowingly allows ideological operatives to exploit journalistic authority, the lapse is no longer accidental—it’s condoned. In such cases, corrections, retractions or internal review become unlikely, because the bias is treated not as a wrong to right but as an acceptable feature of the coverage—and that breeds cynicism.
The egregious Dugan example underscores the depth of the crisis. But, unfortunately, the public sees episodes of sloppy reporting, opaque sourcing, ideological bias and failure to correct or own mistakes on a constant basis. Layered with confirmation bias and media echo chambers, the result is a perception that many news outlets are less truth-seekers than agenda-pushers.
If the Gallup poll is any guide, the media’s credibility is now floating on thin ice—and the Dugan-WSJ affair offers a textbook reason why. Unless news organizations summon ironclad ethical discipline and humility, the Fourth Estate risks not just losing trust, but losing its role as a broker of facts, a check on power and a forum for reasoned public life.
The question now: Can journalism redeem itself before citizen confidence becomes a fossil of the past?
Capturing the public mood, one sarcastic reader had this response to Dugan’s biased article: “Congratulations, WSJ, for your valuable contribution to the already elevated level of public trust in media.”
